> Wireless hasn't been a problem (for me) for at least the past 3 years

Same experience here. My guess lingering reputations take more than 3 years to die off. Everything has surprisingly worked well out of the box me with my two Xubuntu installations I've done the last week. This is coming from a FreeBSD-land, where I'm used to setting up configurations files to load drivers and installing Xorg, xfce and it's plugins from scratch.